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3 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan: the musical

and aesthetic context
benedict taylor

Arthur Sullivans operas based on W. S. Gilberts librettos occupy a strange

and to some extent bewildering place in nineteenth-century music. As both
an outgrowth of a (so-called) serious tradition of operatic culture (as is
made witness not only by Sullivans rigorous training and fluent proficiency
in the mainstream tradition of German music but in the numerous allusions
to and parodies of this august operatic lineage contained within these works)
and at the same time seemingly the predecessors to a less well-regarded
line of operettas, musicals and shows, the Savoy operas dwell in a strange
no mans land between the serious (respectable) and popular (frivolous).
This ambivalence is seen as borne out by that strange and still-present
formulation, the double-barrelled, bicephalic entity referred to by all as
G & S, even in contexts when only the music is being expressly referred
to. At the same time, and not unrelatedly, these works have been afforded
a remarkably polarised reception between enormous popular affection and
critical opprobrium. To understand how this reception history has come
about and where these works might most profitably be situated it is necessary
to investigate more deeply the relationship of these pieces to their musical
and aesthetic background, the sources, models and inspiration from which
this unique series of operas grew, and to explore the impact such aesthetics
might have had for their divided critical reception.

Musical background and influences

The position and reception of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas must be
understood within the context of the cultural-sociological state of music
in Britain prior to 1870. The considerable artistic culture Britain had was
decidedly a literary one, based on common-sense virtues and rational thinking. A distrust of music was deeply rooted in the cultural mentality. Since
the eighteenth century, the arts had been perceived by many as dangerously seductive and effeminate, a mischievous foreign influence that would
lead to the emasculation of the British traits of reason and common-sense
empiricism.1
[36]

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37 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan

Music was of course the most insubstantial and dangerous of all, in its
insidious capacity for infiltration of the emotions and wayward freedom
from rational explanation. Music is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, wrote Joseph Addison in 1711, but if it would make us incapable
of hearing sense, if it would exclude arts that have a much greater tendency to the refinement of human nature; I must confess that I would
allow it no better quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his
commonwealth.2
Years later Sullivan himself left the recollection that At any great meeting on the subject of music, archbishops, judges, politicians, financiers
each one . . . will depreciate any knowledge of music with a smug satisfaction, like a man disowning poor relations.3 Yet obviously there was a
love of music among many. The upshot was that music was imported a
profession for foreigners to dabble in, who were of course allowed (even perhaps expected) to be wayward, morally suspect and over-emotional. Hence
the extraordinary list of distinguished foreign musicians who were to visit
Britain: Handel, J. C. Bach, Haydn, Clementi, Weber and Mendelssohn, to
name just a few. As a result, those native talents that aspired to musical
eminence found the going tough. Sullivan, like Thomas Beecham almost
a century later, would complain of the hardships and obstacles facing the
British musician confronted by such foreign competition. There was little
institutional provision for serious instrumental music, and opera (invariably given in Italian) was there to be chatted over. Britain was not das Land
ohne Musik, but the native talent it possessed received scant encouragement from the existing state of society, and the path of musicians such as
William Sterndale Bennett or George Macfarren was normally one of slow,
sad decline from promising beginnings and overseas recognition, when
exposed to accumulated years of public apathy. Music was simply not built
into the society and cultural institutions of the country.4
It is against this social and cultural backdrop that the rise of Sullivans
career to the 1870s and the initiation of his partnership with W. S. Gilbert
should be charted. The details of Sullivans early career are well known: on
winning the first Mendelssohn scholarship in 1856 and gaining a thorough
training in that bastion of Germanic music, the Leipzig Conservatory, a
performance in 1862 of his graduation piece, music to Shakespeares The
Tempest, established him overnight as the great hope of English music.
Thereafter Sullivan turned his attention to ballet (LIe enchantee), opera
(The Sapphire Necklace, 1864, now mostly lost), symphony (1866), a cello
concerto, overtures, songs (including the five notable Shakespeare settings
and the first English song cycle, The Window, to words by Tennyson),
numerous hymn settings and a small number of slight, though charming
instrumental pieces.

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38 Benedict Taylor

The achievement in these works is often considerable; the symphony,

for instance, is one of the brightest to emerge from the decades between
Schumann and Brahms, and would remain unsurpassed in English music
until Elgar four decades later. Stylistically, the influences of Mendelssohn,
Schumann and Schubert in particular are felt in the more substantial orchestral works, but from the beginning in The Tempest there is the peculiar,
intangible stamp of Sullivan emerging confidently from this familiar background. At the same time, such serious productions would not in themselves
keep Sullivans body attached to the vertiginous flights of his soul, and in
order to make a living he turned increasingly to the lucrative market for
songs and ballads, a need which would eventually be satisfied by the financial
independence provided by the extraordinary operatic success with Gilbert.
The operatic backdrop to the emergence of Gilbert and Sullivans form
of musical theatre in the 1870s is multifaceted. Standing behind any English
operatic work of the time is the earlier tradition of ballad opera, a genre
not directly relatable to the Savoy operas but present as a general precedent.
More recently, the nineteenth century saw the growth of a genre, English
Romantic opera, that survived into the twentieth century, even if this tradition is now little known; significant works include John Barnetts The
Mountain Sylph (1834), Michael Balfes The Bohemian Girl (1843), W. V.
Wallaces Maritana (1845) and Julius Benedicts The Lily of Killarney (1862).
This heritage provided an immediate context for a more serious (if hardly
heavy) English opera, and indeed what we have of Sullivans early Sapphire
Necklace clearly lies in this tradition. Two influential models can be found
for Gilbert and Sullivans earliest work: French opera-bouffe and the English
theatrical burlesque. Offenbachs opera-bouffe itself in part an outshoot
of Aubers opera comique was the initial impetus for Sullivans first comic
operatic outing with his friend F. C. Burnand as librettist, Cox and Box, and
both The Zoo (to a text by B. C. Stephenson) and Trial by Jury (Gilbert) of
1875 were run as starters to Offenbach works, though they quickly became
the main attraction of the evening. Gilberts work grew out of the world
of burlesque, and his first collaboration with Sullivan, the long-lost Thespis
(1871), comes from this more humble stable.
In conjunction, Sullivan brought his training in the wider European
tradition to bear in his comic operas. He had been exposed to a wide range
of operatic music in Leipzig and later at Covent Garden under Costa, besides
having prepared vocal scores of numerous repertoire operas.5 Perhaps the
most decisive influence and role model for his turn to comic opera was
the figure of Rossini, whom Sullivan later claimed was probably the first
person who inspired me with a love for the stage and things operatic.6
Sullivan had met the Italian composer in Paris in 1862 and by all accounts
got on splendidly with the ageing master. Beyond this influence, the line of

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39 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan

comic operas in German (Lortzing, Nicolai, Cornelius) and French opera

comique (epitomised by Auber) must have provided notable precedent for
his endeavours. Sullivans early comic works therefore relate to and stand
at the confluence of several traditions. While Offenbach was the immediate
catalyst, Sullivan would draw on a wider and deeper reserve for his comic
operas.

Musical characteristics
The qualities indelibly associated with Sullivan scarcely need extensive exposition. Alexander Mackenzie, in an early account that remains one of the
most perceptive and understanding to this day, identifies Sullivans characteristic gifts of melody, graceful clearness of instrumentation, as well as
a dramatic sense (which obtains results by obviously simple means).7 To
these qualities one could add a deft sense of piquant harmonic colour, and
not least a remarkable gift for imaginative and metrically apt word-setting.
This latter quality is the one aspect of Sullivans compositional technique
that has received adequate scholarly attention, and it is worth remembering
that if Gilberts texts are commonly held up to be a more significant aspect
of the combined work than in many other operas, much of the credit must
go to Sullivan for enabling the words, in all their wit, to be perceived so
clearly in the first place. Indeed, the two creators are the bequeathers of
a near-perfect fusion of word and music rarely equalled in the history of
musical drama.
A further important feature of Sullivans music is of course his keen
sense of musical humour as a correlate to Gilberts own comic gifts. This is
seen especially in the use of parody that accompanied Sullivan throughout
his career. The delight in parody and humorous pastiche obviously was
fairly innate: Clara Barnett, a colleague at Leipzig, left an account of the
composer during his student years taking a wicked delight in sitting at
the piano and parodying a Rossini cavatina.8 As has often been noticed,
though, Sullivans attitude to parody changed gradually across his operas.
We see a general progression away from the obviously satirical Cox and Box
and Trial by Jury with their often hilarious parodies of operatic tradition,
through the sometimes ballad-opera feel of The Sorcerer and HMS Pinafore
to the more complex, nuanced relationship of the mature Savoy style to
earlier operatic tradition. Increasingly there is the infiltration of characteristic English elements Pinafores glees, Ruddigores hornpipes, gavottes
and older dances (Sorcerer, Gondoliers, Haddon Hall), madrigals (Mikado,
Ruddigore, Yeomen), ballads (Patience, Iolanthe). By the time of the move to
the new, purpose-built Savoy theatre in 1881, Sullivans comic operas were

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40 Benedict Taylor

indisputably an art form in their own right, forming a new and distinctive
tradition, sui generis.
A closer investigation of the celebrated ghost scene from Ruddigore
(Act II) reveals several of the deeper musical qualities Sullivan could bring
to his comic operas. This scene is notable as an instance of where the
composer did not rein in his creative talent (causing no little irritation with
Gilbert), and is consequently valuable for understanding the range of his
musical capabilities in these works.
The opening chorus (Painted emblems of a race) immediately sets the
solemn tone of the scene, a sombre D minor, the male chorus accompanied by low strings and punctuated by piano brass. In tone and idiom this
passage immediately suggests the influence of mid-century Italian opera,
most particularly the Miserere chorus from Act IV of Verdis Il trovatore,
which was doubtless in the back of Sullivans mind. This in itself is probably
more a case of Sullivan calling on an allusion for straight expressive effect
than of intended parody of this style.9 We are moving comfortably along
familiar lines then, until Sullivan slips in a surprise at the approach to the
cadence; the dominant moves down to a (major) subdominant chord and
suddenly the Dorian mode opens up before us. From a fairly conventional,
if effective, Verdian pastiche, a whole new realm is disclosed, an unmistakably English, crumbling Gothic atmosphere, stepping out from the past
into the world once more, that forms one side of Ruddigores distinctive
sound-world.
Modality thus constitutes one of the integral elements of this scene, most
notably the startling Phrygian passage of Set upon thy course of evil. The
other feature is a pronounced chromaticism that seems to spill out of the
prologue from Sullivans The Golden Legend of the previous year. The music
is suffused with diminished-seventh complexes a standard technique for
musical horror, but treated with a systematic urge that recalls Liszt. Where
these two elements intersect is in the emphasis on the flattened-second scaledegree contained within the Phrygian scale and the concomitant tritone
For the former, one should note the prominence given
made with degree 5.
at the start of the scene to the Neapolitan harmony, E-flat the home tonality
of Sullivans opera. The latter interval is contained within the diminishedseventh complex and makes numerous appearances throughout the scene.
It is seen in the eerie parallel-tritone part-writing of Last of our accursed
line and with the frightening continuation of the Phrygian passage, ascending via an octatonic scale from C to a climactic impasse on F-sharp. The
emphasis on the tritone is then taken up at a larger scale in the ensuing number: When the night wind howls in Gervase Hughess words, unquestionably the finest piece of descriptive music that Sullivan ever wrote, in
which we may find . . . an apotheosis of his matured harmonic resource.10

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41 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan

This song contains several characteristic Sullivan harmonic traits, most pertinently here the quasi-modal modulation to the flattened leading degree
(DC) followed by a common-tone switch from C to A-flat, characteristic of
many nineteenth-century composers with an ear for harmonic colour but
perhaps most familiar to Sullivan from Gounod. The upshot of these two
typical progressions is, however, the quite atypical polarity created between
the D minor outward frame of the piece and the tritonally dissonant A-flat
passage at its centre. Truly these ghosts are diaboli in musica.
The orchestration throughout is a model of imagination harnessed to
clarity, and when the limited recourses of the pit orchestra he had at his
disposal is taken into consideration, Sullivans achievement becomes even
more impressive. The influence of Berlioz is often read into this song,
though in truth there is no exact model for Sullivan by now. Thus, as this
example shows, Sullivan would bring to a lighter more popular genre the
skill and resources of a prodigiously gifted musician trained in the serious
Germanic tradition of Leipzig, and in time transform it into something
unique and unparalleled. Just as Gilbert and Carte had a large part in
turning the morally and socially suspect theatrical world of the burlesque
into something eminently respectable, so would Sullivan transform the
musical potential of light opera/opera-bouffe into a genre comparable to
that of Rossini, Auber or Lortzing.

Aesthetic qualities and critical problems

Sullivan was not prone to extensive philosophical reflection on the purposes
and aesthetics of music. In common with many professional composers of
an earlier age, writing music was his job, and he did it without feeling
the need to construct elaborate systems or specious polemic to justify his
ways. Yet on several occasions he left evidence of his general views on his
music that can be enlightening for the modern reader trying to understand
his aims. As he more than once complained to Gilbert, music should act
in its own proper sphere, arising out of and intensifying the emotional
elements of the situation. The stories set should be of human interest and
probability, with a balance of dramatic, humorous and romantic aspects.11
An interview given to the San Francisco Daily Chronicle in 1885 presents a
good picture of the composers aesthetic aims.
The opera of the future is a compromise . . . Not the French school, with
gaudy and tinsel tunes, its lambent light and shades, its theatrical effects and
clap-trap, not the Wagnerian school, with its sombreness and heavy
ear-splitting airs, with its mysticism and unreal sentiment; not the Italian
school, with its fantastic airs and fioriture and far-fetched effects. It is a

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42 Benedict Taylor
compromise between these three a sort of eclectic school, a selection of the
merits of each one. I do not believe in operas based on gods and myths. That
is the fault of the German school. It is metaphysical music it is philosophy.
What we want are plots which give rise to characters of flesh and blood, with
human emotions and human passions. Music should speak to the heart, and
not to the head.12

What is evident from this account is that Sullivan valued such qualities as
emotional directness of communication, empathy and human relevance,
and a stylistic pluralism that is not afraid to draw on a variety of national
and historical styles. Attributes often prized in the Romantic era such
as the fixation on the artists own subjectivity and extreme emotional
states, the individual genius, misunderstood in his lifetime, writing for
posterity, and a radical, progressive musical language are clearly not priorities for Sullivan. Such personal characteristics are notable as many of
them potentially give rise to problems in relation to prevalent nineteenthand twentieth-century aesthetic ideologies, which may in part explain the
sometimes negative reception his work has been afforded.
A consequence of his polystylism is that the charge of eclecticism has
often been levelled at Sullivan. This term is commonly understood nowadays
as an insult of some (indefinable) form, though Sullivan himself was quite
open in expressing this feature I am very eclectic in my tastes13 a sort
of eclectic school which, to the contrary, he seems to view as a positive
attribute. A consequence of this relation to earlier music is that Sullivans
music is also often marked by a certain conservatism of style and models.
The criticisms here seem to be based on the assumption that (a) Sullivans
music is derivative and insufficiently original, and (b) that these attributes
are defensible criteria for aesthetic judgement. Both propositions are in fact
open to question.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century new aesthetic ideologies in
England and Germany began to see artistic truth and value as residing
in the individual creator-genius, endowed with a unique subjective identity and originality, whose art works thus stand outside society and prior
precedents. Beauty, earlier in the eighteenth century the central category
of aesthetic judgement, becomes replaced by truth, understood either as
metaphysical truth (related to the incomprehensible sublime or profound),
emotional truth (often equated with the emotionally extreme and unstable) or historical truth (i.e., the modern and progressive). This explains
the latent criticism directed at Sullivan through the eclectic label, as the
wealth of allusions, parodies and echoes of other music might seem to mitigate against any chance of artistic originality and personal authenticity.
Yet this assumption is fundamentally undermined by the simple fact that

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43 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan

his music is so unmistakable; there are in fact few more characteristic composers. Eclectic, as a criticism levelled against Sullivan, is thus an empty
charge, as no one has ever doubted that his music possesses in abundance
an unmistakable individual quality, despite the separate elements that have
gone to make it up. In a word, Sullivan sounds inimitably like Sullivan, and
always has. One might better read eclectic as synthetic, as the music of a
pre-Romantic composer such as Mozart clearly was. Essentially, Sullivans
taste coincides with a more eighteenth-century Enlightenment outlook
on art.
More substantial is the claim of conservatism. Despite some exceptions,
it would be hard to deny that Sullivans music is not the most radical in existence. However, one must critically examine the grounds upon which this
feature, if taken as a criterion for judgement, is based, since the unquestioned
adherence to the ideology of modernity that lies behind this assumption
became increasingly untenable in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Accounts that actually seek to understand Sullivans music rather than automatically deciding its artistic value on an external scale of progressiveness
must therefore move beyond the discredited cliches of unthinking criticism. Recent scholars have found more enlightening ways of understanding
Sullivans historical approach by relating it to a richer, more subtle understanding of historical time than the simplistic linear model progressivism
admits.14
Bound up with this stylistic conservatism is a desire for directness of
communication, witnessed by Sullivans insistence on music that speaks
to the heart. Mackenzie notes Sullivans distrust of over-complex/elaborate
means, speaking of his maxim of respecting the fitness of things; with
the result that the human touch went very straight to its mark, and he
took care that that touch should not be weakened, or obscured, by either
unnecessary complications or diffuseness.15
Directness of communication means working within publicly understood linguistic/expressive conventions, which explains the important function of Sullivans conservatism of language. An obvious result of this is his
musics accessibility and, as a consequence, popularity.
This is one reason its apparent straightforwardness why his music
may be reviled or patronised by those wanting more complex communicative techniques. It is only too easy to be able to dismiss something
open and straightforward; because Sullivan does not condescend to us,
we condescend to him.16 Clearly Sullivan cannot possibly be held to be a
bad composer in terms of technical proficiency or competence indeed,
he was one of the most gifted composers of the nineteenth century and
had received a rigorous technical grounding.17 His fault, as much as it is
one, is merely that his music is largely conventional, and seeks to convey

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44 Benedict Taylor

emotional states in an uncomplicated, direct manner accessible to many, not

the few. Yet there is no definitive way of judging the emotional truth of artistic expression (if there were, it is unlikely that academics and critics would
have privileged access to it), and the numerous generations that have been
captivated by his music might well bear out Percy Youngs contention that
Sullivans simplicities frequently carried their own kind of profundity.18
One place where the issue does become more clouded is concerning the
issue of Sullivans parodies. Opera that most unrealistic of art forms
has so many expressive conventions and dramatic stocks-in-trade that it is
amusing for a really talented composer and author to send it up. This gives
a nice twist of irony to the issue above: Sullivan is doing it just as well or
better than the model, showing how easy it is to copy or send up a style. As
Thomas Dunhill contended with Poor wandring one (Pirates of Penzance),
Sullivans music is fully equal to any of the songs it sets out to satirise.19
Hence, appropriately, the last laugh is on operatic snobs, not by them. The
resistance to Gilbert and Sullivan encountered in some surely relates to this
parody of sacred operatic cows, which shows all too uncomfortably how
baseless the snobbish fetishisation of certain names at the expense of others
is (what else would explain the anger, the seemingly personal resentment
detractors hold against these works? It has no musical basis). And, typical
of Sullivans humane qualities, he does this affectionately, unmaliciously;
hence it is easier to be scornful about this and ignore the satire, as it is too
subtle for some detractors minds.

Cultural issues
These Romantic aesthetics that prized originality, sincerity and profundity
had a further consequence in imbuing music with a moral imperative. Art
has a serious ethical function; eo ipso all music must be serious music.
By far the longest-lasting and most damaging effect on Sullivans reputation has been a cultural snobbery against popular music instigated during
his lifetime and perpetuated long afterwards: the idea that true art must
be serious, highbrow and ethically exemplary what has been called the
gospel of earnestness.20 As early as 1883, The Musical Review, following
the announcement of Sullivans knighthood, wrote that Some things that
Mr Arthur Sullivan may do, Sir Arthur ought not to do . . . it will look
rather more than odd to see announced in the papers that a new comic
opera is in preparation, the book by Mr W. S. Gilbert and the music by Sir
Arthur Sullivan. A musical knight . . . must not dare to soil his hands with
anything less than an anthem or a madrigal; oratorio . . . and symphony,
must now be his line.21 A view that was becoming increasingly widespread

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was that comic opera was at best a negligible activity for a composer of
Sullivans talents, and at worst a prostitution of his ethical duty, a betrayal
of gifts greater, perhaps, than fell to any English musician since the time of
Purcell.22
This divide between serious and popular became increasingly evident during the nineteenth century and relates to a general Teutonicising of English music and culture. Certain composers, recalled Charles
Maclean, almost exclusively German, were regarded in the Victorian era as
classical; while the music of everyone else was treated as something out of
the pale.23 Though Sullivan had been trained in Germany and was a forceful advocate of Schumann and Schubert at a time when these composers
were little appreciated in England, his aesthetics stopped short of the more
extreme manifestations of a view which in a morally charged Victorian
culture held art and entertainment to be mutually exclusive. These aesthetic and ethical values were spread through the value-system of a new
group of critics and composers occupying leading institutional positions
in Britain. In their groundbreaking and provocative study of the English
Musical Renaissance, Robert Stradling and Meirion Hughes detail how
a small group of musicians and critics emanating from narrow range of
institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, the Royal Academy and Royal College of
Music) propagated their own ethical and aesthetic agenda and as a consequence wrote their own values into the official history of English music
heard ever since. The effects of this ideology can be still seen in standard
accounts of the development of English music over a century later.24
To be sure, one might justly see Sullivan himself as affected by this
dichotomy in his constant desire to write a grand opera or something more
worthy of his talents and his recurring dissatisfaction with the Savoy as a
medium for his talent. But, though this aspect is undoubtedly present to
an extent, this does not really point to Sullivans distaste for comic opera
tout court; documentary evidence suggests it was more the inadequate provision for human emotions and situations in Gilberts librettos and the
feeling that the forms of these works restricted his creative potential that
dissatisfied Sullivan. And when he did write a grand opera, Ivanhoe, the
music has since been criticised for stepping out of the Savoy in places.25 The
assumption that this was a subconscious reversion from a composer used to
a lighter style is hardly a satisfactory explanation; one might better view this
as demonstrating how good tunes, humour and popularity were not categorically distinct from serious music for Sullivan, unlike for many critics of
his time and since. The two occupy differing stages on a continuum between
weightiness and levity, as demonstrated by the intermediary style of the near
contemporaneous Yeomen of the Guard or The Beauty Stone. This snobbery
against Sullivans lighter music, conditioned by the underlying imperative

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46 Benedict Taylor

6 Sullivan the musician: conducting the Leeds Festival. Illustrated London News (23 October 1886),
p. 421.

of moral earnestness and perpetuated by successive generations of critics

whose desire for critical judgement no doubt outweighed their sensitivity
to art (and finally, it must be said, their knowledge of Sullivans music),
ultimately has fed into a wider snobbery against the Savoy operas. Little of
this has significant musical basis; rather, it is primarily directed against a
social class and culture associated with these works. This is due above all
to the phenomenon of amateur performances and their association with
middle-class Middle England. (The clear distasteful social snobbery here
shows that this quality is still very much alive and hence that Gilberts satire
still has targets, ironically actually perpetuating these works relevance.) As
David Cannadine has demonstrated, these operas, with the satire they poke
at national institutions and the middle classes, eventually became institutionalised themselves and associated with these same conservative values.26
And the standards of amateur operatic performances are, obviously, not
always the highest. (This is not to disparage amateur performances but

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47 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan

merely to suggest that if most peoples exposure to a repertoire comes from

this source they are unlikely to hold it as highly in esteem as one featuring
glittering star soloists in international opera houses.)
The dominance of the amateur operatic society was caused by the deleterious effect of the DOyly Cartes monopoly on performances. Until 1961
the copyright on the Gilbert and Sullivan operas was owned by the company created in their lifetime for their performance, who jealously guarded
the rights and materials to these works, only allowing amateur groups to
perform them (i.e., those who were unlikely to prove much threat to the
DOyly Cartes hegemony). Even Sullivans orchestral scores were not readily
available for study (the well-known vocal scores give little indication of the
full range of Sullivans instrumentation). This is one of the major reasons
why the Savoy operas still largely occupy a position outside the mainstream
repertoire of major opera houses such as Covent Garden. Throughout the
first half of the twentieth century, when opera companies in England were
looking to establish a national repertoire, Sullivans works by far the most
popular survivors from the previous century could not be considered.
In place, earlier works by Balfe, Wallace and Benedict were revived. By the
1960s, it was too late: English opera had found a new mythical founder in
the figure of Britten. If all this had not been the case, the story of the growth
of English opera may well have been substantially different from the present
historical narrative.
It must also be admitted that the DOyly Carte Company themselves
were not always the most musically accomplished of bodies. It may be
a historical fact that the original performance conditions in Gilbert and
Sullivans lifetime were musically limited, but such works are always capable
of a new lease of life. Sullivans music should be allowed to shine in more
fitting conditions; like all works of art, his operas are greater than their
original production capabilities. It is only when we treat Sullivan with
the same artistic respect that we show to Mozart and Schubert wrote one
commentator in 1938, that his peculiar genius can shine untarnished.27

Conclusions: musical position and significance

To understand and appreciate Sullivans music one has to stand above the
ingrained aesthetic norms passed down from one particular, rather narrow,
strand of Romantic thought and reinstate the values of beauty, human
sympathy, popular comprehension and accessibility valued in an earlier
age. Like Rossini, Sullivan was not fully in sympathy with Romanticism
in its more extreme, individualistic aspects. His music indeed has more
affinities with that of Mozart or Rossini than with contemporaries such as

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48 Benedict Taylor

Brahms or Wagner. (In this light, it is notable that a distinguished opera

scholar such as E. J. Dent would hold that a course of Mozart in English
might be the best step towards educating our on-coming public to a really
intelligent appreciation of Sullivan.28 )
The reasons why Sullivans operatic reputation has not followed that of
Mozart or Rossini are bound up with this cultural situation of music within
nineteenth-century Britain. In Vaughan Williamss opinion, Sullivan was
a jewel in the wrong setting,29 while for James Day, similarly, Sullivan
narrowly missed becoming an English Mozart . . . simply because Victorian
art had to be serious and chivalrous for it to be taken seriously.30 In his
sense of harmonic and timbral colour, and the matchless gift for melody,
Sullivan often calls to mind his near-contemporary Bizet, with whom
he shares many affinities. The parallel between the two might indeed
be instructive for understanding Sullivans cultural position and what
he might have achieved had there been a stronger operatic tradition in
England. Both composers, precociously talented, tended towards a postMendelssohnian/Schubertian idiom and were at their happiest in the
smaller set-piece forms typifying the opera comique that gave free reign
to their unmistakable talents. (Sullivans affinities with French music and
culture have often been noted probably more so indeed than with any
other national style.) The major advantage Bizet had over Sullivan was in
being born in a country with a strong operatic culture, which enabled him
to work within established traditions and institutional frameworks even
if ultimately he would transform them (and, perhaps, in dying at just the
right time to become mythologised). Without such a serious operatic heritage behind him Sullivan would fall foul of aesthetic avatars that sought to
distance his music from what was considered serious culture.
Yet perhaps Sullivans achievement was in fact commensurate with his
potential. Within the aesthetic context of the time, Sullivans inclination for
eclectic, synthetic music was in retrospect best suited to such comic operas.
In these his comic gifts, his skill at parody of other music and flair for
melody, rhythm and word-setting, would find its best vehicle. One should
be wary of suggesting, because of this, that these works are the exclusive
repository of his genius; Sullivans musical qualities were diffused throughout all his output and many of his greatest serious works could not have
been written within the confines of Gilberts texts and the style imposed
by the conditions of the Savoy. Yet such was the nature of Sullivans talents
and the cultural-aesthetic circumstances in which he lived and followed, that
the comic operas with Gilbert provide perhaps the most consistently perfect
expression of his inimitable qualities and without doubt the most enduring.
Sullivans music in its stylistic pluralism, accessibility, its good-natured
blend of wit and sentiment, comprehensibility and erudition, moving

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49 Resituating Gilbert and Sullivan

happily between high and low styles, and its own particular beauty would
have fitted perfectly within an eighteenth-century aesthetic, but suffered in
an age and culture that in hindsight can only be described as well intentioned but misguided. In Ian Parrotts words, He was essentially the most
broad-minded musician in perhaps the most narrow and unoriginal school
of thought in musical history.31 Only now, with the passing of time (but
constancy of Sullivans presence in the repertoire and English culture), we
may perhaps outgrow the narrow prejudices of a less understanding age,
and recognise the unique talent that Sullivan possessed. Works that are still
going strongly a century after their creation suggest that the ephemeral,
insignificant triviality of such creations and the aesthetic under which
they have been judged has been mistaken.

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